


every angel is terrifying

by punkfaery



Series: elegies [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alien Gender/Sexuality, Body Horror, Domestic Fluff, Eldritch Angels, Established Relationship, Idiots in Love, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Kissing, M/M, Theology, because that's what we're going for here, is it possible for something to be sappy and horrifying at the same time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-03-20 13:51:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18993916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkfaery/pseuds/punkfaery
Summary: “Why does it bother you?” Crowley asked. “Even if you can’t get to them in time to wipe their memories, it’s not like anyone’d believe them. Kid goes running to her mum saying Ooh, I’ve just seen a bloke with three heads and a sixteen-foot wingspan, what do you think’s going to happen? Chances are they’ll just pat her on the shoulder and tell her what a vivid imagination she’s got.”“That’s not what worries me,” said Aziraphale.





	every angel is terrifying

Most psychics are faking it.

It’s easy enough to do, after all. A combination of technological trickery, cold reading, subconscious cues, pre-planned routines and audience plants – Aziraphale half-admires their creativity. (The admiration is tempered by guilt, though, because admiring an act of deception – however ingenious – takes him dangerously close to barriers that he isn’t meant to cross.) They get their own talk shows and publish books about mind control, bend spoons and relate stories of bright white tunnels and angelic choirs. It’s all thoroughly ridiculous.

And then are the others.

The real ones.

The gifted. The sensitive. The ones who can actually _do it_ , even if they don’t realise what “it” is, and might not ever realise. Most go through life thinking they just have an exceptionally well-developed sense of intuition, and a knack for guessing when a train’s going to be late. Those people – they notice things. Notice _him._

“Why does it bother you?” Crowley asked him once. “Even if you can’t get to them in time to wipe their memories, it’s not like anyone’d believe them. Kid goes running to her mum saying ooh, I’ve just seen a bloke with three heads and a sixteen-foot wingspan, what do you think’s going to happen? Chances are they’ll just pat her on the shoulder and tell her what a vivid imagination she’s got.”

“That’s not what worries me,” Aziraphale said, frowning down at his feet. Left, right, left, right. It was easy to do when he wasn’t thinking about it. As soon as he became aware of all the stuff his body was meant to be doing – breathing, blinking, heartbeat – it started to feel like a chore. All those complicated things going on in there, where nobody could see them. All those neurons firing and muscles contracting. Amazing, really. How did ordinary people manage to make it all happen,without even worrying about whether it was working right or not? He fixed his gaze on the horizon and thought determinedly about ducks.

“Then what?”

“I don’t know,” Aziraphale said. “It’s just… Strange, I suppose. Being observed like that. It doesn’t usually happen.”

“I observe you,” Crowley pointed out. “On a fairly regular basis, I might add.”

“It’s not the same, and you know it.”

“What? Don’t I count?”

He was smiling, rather uncertainly. Aziraphale looked at him and imagined the skin under the fabric of his shirt, the denim of his jeans. The flesh under that. The bone under that. All so very human, so alive and not at the same time. His chest hurt.

“What? What is it?” Crowley peered at him suspiciously. “You’ve got that look on.”

“What look?”

Crowley paused to chuck his coffee cup into a nearby bin. It went in perfectly, because of course it did. “Well. It’s not a _look,_ exactly. Sometimes you just go all bright around the edges. And you start flickering, a bit. Like ball lightning.”

This was news to Aziraphale, who had never really taken the time to examine his own aura, but he let it pass. “It’s nothing, truly,” he said. “I was just thinking… Well. Suffice to say, you count. Very much so, in fact.”

If Crowley had really been human, Aziraphale thought he might have flushed. As it was, he just became very interested in his fingernails – which were currently painted black, and slightly bitten around the edges – and the conversation was picked up again after a pause and veered off on several different tangents at once.

The fact is: Aziraphale doesn’t go in for flashy displays. All that stuff with appearing in a blaze of smug glory and declaiming _Do not be afraid!_ has always seemed a little tasteless to him, although saying so to Gabriel would get him demoted (or worse) in a heartbeat. Why the theatrics? Why not simply impart one’s message and leave? It’s just so – unnecessary.  

So when it happens without his behest, it’s uncomfortable for everyone involved.

“Oh, bless you! You’re too kind,” an old woman says to him, beaming as he helps collect the groceries that lie scattered across the pavement. Her name is Maureen. She’s seventy-five, widowed these last six years, and lives half an hour’s walk away – too far for someone of her age to walk, especially with the hip injury she’s still recovering from. Aziraphale knows all that without having to ask. Sometimes he wishes he didn’t have to know so much. He is old beyond reckoning, and his memory is long.

“No trouble, dear lady, no trouble at all,” he says, replacing the items carefully. A tin of shortbread. Milk. Eggs. Nearby a pot of Greek yoghurt lies with its lid off, the contents dripping down the kerb and into the storm drain. Aziraphale glances at it, and the pavement is clean.

He replaces the intact pot in her trolley-bag, then begins to do it up for her. “Oh, don’t worry,” Maureen says, forestalling him, “let me do that, it’s got a funny zip, you’ve just got to – ”

Aziraphale’s neatly manicured fingers barely brush her bony ones, but even that fleeting touch is enough. She snatches her hand back as if burned. “Oh!” she says, more of a breath than a word, and holds her hand to her chest, cradling it. The veins are blue and ropy. Her eyes, when they meet his, are so wide that he can see the whites all around. He can see himself reflected in the pupils. The image shimmers and warps, just for a second, like a heat haze.

“I’m terribly sorry,” Aziraphale says, making a mental note to wipe this part of the encounter from her brain before they part. “Static electricity, was it? There’s a good deal of it about at the moment – I suppose it must be the heat… Is that everything, my dear lady?”

She nods, but Aziraphale is doubtful that she has even registered what he’s saying. Her stare is awed, uncomprehending, the face of someone watching reality bend over backwards and cartwheel neatly away. He sighs. This is always the worst part of dealing with people like Maureen. They can see everything. They understand none of it. Seeing and understanding: it’s a harder combination that you might think. The only human (for a given value of “human”) who’s ever successfully pulled it off is Adam Young, and it hadn’t been a particularly pleasant experience.

Drawing on his power, he excises the memory from her head. It’s elegantly done. A flick of the scalpel, a few sutures to close the wound. If a scar remains, it’s tiny. Tiny, and unobtrusive enough that Maureen won’t even notice it’s there.

“Get home safe,” Aziraphale says, imbuing the words with an authority that ensures Maureen will reach her home alive and well and with a new spring in her step, the pain in her hip miraculously eased for the time being. And with that, they part ways.

“I met the nicest man in the street the other day,” Maureen says to her son Will, as he screws a new bulb into the downlight. “I took a bit of a spill, and he stopped right there and got me back on my feet. Picked up all my things for me, even did my bag up. Such a lovely man…”

“You fell over?” Will says, tripping down the ladder in a hurry. “Christ, Mum, you never said. Are you all right? How’s your hip?”

“Oh, goodness, I’m fine, don’t worry about that. No, I was just surprised that he took the time to help. He was on his way somewhere, anyone could see that, but that didn’t stop him. You don’t find that consideration any more, do you? People nowadays – well, they’re always in such a hurry. Rushing here, rushing there. I wish they’d make up their minds about where they want to be.”

Will is folding up the ladder, his back to her. “Older guy, was it?”

“Yes,” said Maureen, and then, bewildered, “ – I mean, no. No, I don’t think so.” Now that she puts her mind to it, she cannot remember a thing about the nice gentleman who helped her. She has a recollection of white hair, or perhaps blonde, and a dark coat. Beyond that: nothing. She racks her brain, but every time she gets hold of an image it slips away again, like a piece of soap in the bathtub.

A small part of her mind finds this worrying. Another, slightly bigger part wraps the worry in a blanket, puts it to bed, and sings it a nice little lullaby. Maureen finds that she is smiling, suddenly contented, although she couldn’t have said why. The brief spike of anxiety

(can’t be real _shouldn’t_ be real)

is now nothing but a minuscule prickle in the back of her brain. “Never mind about him,” she says, getting shakily to her feet. “How about another cuppa? I’ve got some Battenberg…”

“Mum, you know I hate that stuff,” Will says. “It tastes like soap.”

“Well, you’ve never said so before.”

“I have, I say it every week.”

They fall to bickering, and the memory of those wings and eyes is forgotten: buried deep down where no one – even Maureen, with all her needle-sharpness and obstinacy – will ever find it.

 

* * *

 

If looking at Aziraphale’s true form is like staring into the sun, Crowley’s is almost the exact opposite.

Aziraphale can see it, if he concentrates. It looks, more or less, like a night sky, only without the constellations. Light bends around it. Matter – _changes._ Warps. (A leaf crackling dryly as it shrivels up. A curl of smoke, slinking up from a nearby rubbish bin.) He supposes that most people would find it terrifying. In fact, he knows that they do. He’s seen mothers pass Crowley on the street and instinctively pull their children a little closer, seen shopkeepers’ welcoming smiles turn fixed and glassy. Cats hiss at him; birds take flight. And that’s to say nothing of horses. He’s never seen Crowley so relieved as he was when automobiles replaced carriages as the main form of transport.

If he digs a little deeper, he can get a sense of what they’re feeling. Vertigo, essentially. A sick uneasiness in the chest and stomach, like seeing a photograph of the Earth from outer space, or standing at the very top of a skyscraper looking down at the toylike traffic below.

The sunglasses make it worse. Eyes are the windows to the soul, after all, even if said soul is damned and said eyes are yellow and reptilian, and there’s something about those impassive black circles that puts people off. Even Aziraphale, from time to time. It’s like staring into Kubrick’s monolith.

“They’re staying,” Crowley had said shortly, after Aziraphale had asked him to please take them off inside, honestly, this was just getting _silly,_ it was only the two of them, and what did he think was going to happen? “I'm used to them,” he’d added, fiddling with one of the arms. “Everything’s too bright without.”

It was such an obvious lie that Aziraphale had almost laughed. “Really? We both know that isn’t the real reason. How many times do I have to tell you that I don’t mind in the slightest?”

Crowley had faltered briefly, an ambiguous expression flitting across his face. Something like – startlement? Disbelief? Then he shook his head, mask of sardonic composure returning. “Sure, angel. Whatever you say.” He paused. “Would you rather I wear contacts?”

“No,” Aziraphale said, inexplicably horrified at the idea, “no, absolutely not. Don’t you dare.”

Aziraphale can’t remember ever being frightened of Crowley. Even at their very first meeting, when he knew perfectly well that he _ought_ to have been. Whatever way you looked at it, Crowley was The Adversary. The very word “demon” conjured up ideas of darkness and corruption, of squirming nests of maggots, hellfire, needle-sharp teeth. But he’d sensed that aura before he’d even seen its owner. A dark corona, velvety and opaque.

It felt – quiet.

Like stepping out of the summer heat and into a gloriously dim, cool parlour. Like turning the lights out after a long day.

 _Beautiful,_ he thought once, watching the lamplight catch the yellow irises and turn them gold, and immediately bit down on the thought. Aesthetic appreciation was all well and good. Beyond that, things started getting dangerous.

The point is: cramming a metaphysical essence into a small, human-shaped container was never going to be easy. Aziraphale is used to it, now. Years of practise mean it’s become second nature. Even so, bits of it still leak out sometimes, spilling over the edges. A faint smell of ozone. An inexplicable otherness. A grating echo behind his words, like two people are talking at the same time. Nothing that can’t be hidden.

Others find the whole “made flesh” thing rather more difficult. It hurts them, eliding their true forms like that. So they cheat a little – bend the laws of physics just slightly, giving them enough space to flex their metaphysical wings. Pulling just a little of the ethereal plane into the everyday world, hoping all the while that reality will take the hint and look the other way.

The results manifest differently for everyone. Raphael, he’s heard, can send a person into spasms of divine ecstasy simply by walking too close to them on the street, and dogs that have grown tired from long walks will perk up, tails wagging. Gabriel? Well, that’s a little trickier. Supposedly he exudes a sense of…

“Twattishness,” Crowley suggests.

Aziraphale sighs. “I was going to say _power.”_

“All right – powerful twattishness, then.”

“I couldn’t possibly comment,” says Aziraphale, primly.

It’s not just the psychics. Ordinary people see it too, by some fluke or random chance. Aziraphale has observed their faces change, now and again. A flicker of badly-disguised fear, followed by chagrin – after all, what reason is there to be afraid of a kind-looking gentleman in unfashionable clothing, going about his errands in the local shop? He doesn’t know exactly what it is that they see, in that brief instant, but he can guess.

Something shining and molten, like newly-blown glass. A light too fierce to be contained by the suit of bones and meat into which has been crudely stuffed. A wingspan the length of the horizon. Mother-of-pearl teeth. Eyes, innumerable eyes. Planes and angles that simply _don’t make_ _sense,_ like Escher’s staircase rendered in seven dimensions.

And of course, almost everybody senses that there’s something different about the two of them. They’ll draw unconsciously closer to him, just as they draw away from Crowley. Like there’s a magnetic field surrounding them both: one attracting, the other repelling. Naturally, Crowley can put them at their ease if it suits his purposes – just a little mental push, a whisper of _you like me, you like me –_ but on the whole he chooses not to. “Waste of a miracle,” he says, unconvincingly.

As for Aziraphale.

Aziraphale can _talk_ to people.

That’s nothing so special; everyone can do that, can’t they? It seems obvious. But the way he does it is different. People like him. Even when he’d rather they didn’t, even when he’d rather be left alone with his own thoughts. They tell him things that they wouldn’t tell even their best friends, and they tell him willingly, without being prodded or coaxed into doing so. He often has to ask them politely to stop, before they tell him something he already knows but can’t stand to hear.

It’s nothing to do with miracles, or with how he looks. Something about him ushers you in and says _I will listen, I understand, I will not judge._ Something about him says _Safe._ He supposes he was designed that way.

Crowley’s cold-blooded. That seems obvious, too. It’s just another part of him that the glamour won’t cover, along with the eyes, the lisp, the scattering of iridescent scales that runs down his spine and disappears beneath the waistband of his trousers.

But the cold-bloodedness comes with a whole slew of other things, things that Aziraphale used to find powerfully strange and now accepts wholeheartedly. Winter turns him sluggish, and he’s been known to sleep from October through to January curled up in a snarl of blankets, central heating switched to full blast. His skin doesn’t flush. His hands are like ice, and although Aziraphale can warm them by rubbing them between his own, the warmth always leaches away again in a matter of seconds. And dogs still cower when he goes past, hackles raised, like they’re anticipating a storm.

The body language of demons is not quite the same as that of angels. However, it is similar enough that Aziraphale has grown adept at tracking Crowley’s moods simply by tuning in to the dark halo surrounding him. On a bad day it shrinks, drawing close to his body and quivering around the edges. (Those are the days when his hands shake and he holds himself tensely, and Aziraphale knows better than to ask.) In extremes of emotion it grows, like a shadow lengthens in the afternoon, and extends wings blacker than the night sky.

Aziraphale has met plenty of other demons (if “met” is a synonym for “been threatened by”). He hasn’t yet encountered one whose true form is quite so expressive. Then again, Crowley is not a normal demon. He is not a normal _anything._

“I am _not_ taking you on the train like that,” says Aziraphale. “I don’t even know if it’s allowed.”

“Why shouldn’t it be?” retorts Crowley. “People take animals on the train all the time.”

“You’re not an animal.”

Crowley sways back and forth, pointedly.

“You _aren’t_ ,” insists Aziraphale, “you just happen to look like one at this current moment, it’s not the same thing. Anyway, you’re poisonous, aren’t you? I seem to recall an incident back in 12BC – ”

Crowley sighs, or perhaps hisses. It’s difficult to tell. “I did say sorry about that.”

“It took me months to get a new body,” Aziraphale says bitterly, “and even then they wanted to know why I let the Serpent of Eden get so close to my neck in the first place. Oh, the hoops I had to jump through to explain _that_ one…”

“It’s venomous,” Crowley says. “Technically. Poisonous is different. If you bite someone and they die, that’s venomous. If someone bites you and they die, _that’s_ poisonous.”

Aziraphale frowns. “What if you bite someone and neither of you die?”

“Well, that’s just a wild Friday night."

“I could tape your mouth shut.”

“You could _not.”_

“Why can’t we just take your car?” Aziraphale pleads.

“Sometimes one simply wants to mingle,” says Crowley. “Drink in the hubbub of daily pedestrian life. Observe the comings and goings of humble, ordinary folk.”

Aziraphale gives him a look. Crowley looks back, innocently, tongue flickering.

Eventually he sighs. “If that’s all you’re planning on doing, and I don’t for one moment believe that it is, can’t you just go in human form?”

“Have you been outside lately? Talk about hell freezing over – they should take a tip from London in winter. Bloody arctic. At least like this it’s easier for me to conserve heat. Besides, if I was human I couldn’t do _this_ _–_ ” And with lightning speed he twines himself around Aziraphale’s arm, working his way up past the bicep and towards the neck.

Aziraphale flinches.

“You all right, there?” Crowley says, halting his upwards journey.

“Yes, yes, fine. You just took me by surprise.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re very fast.”

“Yes, I am,” says Crowley, with some pride.

He reaches Aziraphale’s shoulder, wrapping himself loosely around his neck like a scarf. The scales are silky and dry. As he settles into position Aziraphale feels the almost imperceptible flicker of snake-tongue on his skin, and says, a little affronted, “Are you _smelling_ me?”

“…maybe?”

Aziraphale debates whether or not he should be unsettled about this, and decides on not. He puts a hand up and gingerly touches Crowley’s scales, which are – as always – black, with a faint iridescent sheen where the light catches them. Crowley pushes his wedge-shaped head into Aziraphale’s hand, seeking out the warmth.

He sags, defeated.

“Once,” he says. “I will take you on the train _once_. And after that, never again.”

“You say that every time,” says Crowley comfortably, “and it’s never true.”

Aziraphale buttons his coat up over him, ignoring his protests, and steps out of the shop into the freezing January afternoon.

 

* * *

 

Go into an art gallery, and somewhere in there you’ll find a painting of an angel. Several paintings. Whole rooms, in fact, filled with artists from the fifteenth and sixteenth and seventeenth centuries all trying their level best to capture what an angel ought to look like, armed with egg tempera and pigment and neat horsehair brushes.

Their skill, and their imagination, is undeniable. This makes it all the more astonishing that they have managed to come up with a thousand versions of the same image: a human-shaped, human-sized being with a gilded dinner plate stuck gaudily behind its head, outfitted with a white toga and a sweep of blonde curls. The demons tend to be both more entertaining and more imaginative, although you would be hard-pressed to find anything resembling them in the dank, bureaucratic offices of Hell.

You can’t blame the artists. Not really. It’s hard to paint something that both spans horizons and fits into the spaces between molecules.

“That one looks like you,” Crowley says, pointing randomly at a shadowy and understated figure in the background of a Rubens. It stands half-turned, dark eyes watchful.

He glances it over with a critical eye. The hair, he supposes, is similar. So is the build, although Aziraphale would not be caught dead in anything that pale and flimsy, especially not a chiton. “A little,” he allows.

Crowley tilts his head. “You don’t think so?”

He shrugs.

Crowley takes a lot of care with his appearance. Always has. Cultivates an image, although the nature of that image changes depending on the century and what is in fashion at the time. It’s not vanity, not really – he just has an idea, ingrained and definite, of how he wants to look. Aziraphale’s relationship with his own body is rather more ambivalent. It functions as it’s supposed to; it gets him from place to place. (And what more does one need a body for, other than for getting from place to place?) It is neither young nor old, neither handsome nor ugly, neither feminine nor overtly masculine. It is comfortably in the middle of everything. Most of the time, he forgets that he even has it.

“I suppose they all look a bit the same,” Crowley says, eyeing a painting of Michael. Two angels stand at his shoulder, wearing similar expressions of self-righteousness and holding what look very much like sheaves of corn. “Got to hand it to Bruegel – at least he tried to get creative. Though I don’t remember there being quite that many frogs.”

“You’d know better than I would, my dear.”

“Sort of. Not really. Once you go back more than six thousand years things start getting rather hazy.” Crowley twists his hands in his pockets, still staring at the painting. Or at least Aziraphale assumes he’s staring. It’s hard to tell without seeing his eyes.

“What are you thinking?” Aziraphale says, watching him.

Crowley shivers suddenly, seeming to come out of his reverie. “I’m thinking,” he says, stepping decisively away, “that it’s time for lunch.”

It’s only 11:30, but Aziraphale doesn’t argue.

 

* * *

 

They lie together on the couch. Crowley is supine between Aziraphale’s thighs, with his legs draped over the end of the sofa and his head resting on Aziraphale’s chest. The sunglasses have been discarded on a nearby table. Without them his face looks different – more sharp-edged, more vulnerable.

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies? And even if one of them pressed me against his heart, I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence; for beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.”

Crowley’s eyes are shut, dark lashes fanning out over his cheeks. Aziraphale wonders if he can feel the vibrations of speech, the rise and fall of breathing. He wonders if he’s even awake.

“The beginning of terror,” he begins again, “which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.”

He pauses.

“Go on,” Crowley says, muzzily. “I’m still listening.”

Aziraphale smiles, and continues.

“And so I hold myself back,” he says, “and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need? Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.”

It’s not the end of the poem, but for some reason he stops again. The silence hangs there insubstantially, like cobwebs draped high in the rafters of an attic. He breathes, and listens to it. Not _quite_ silence, after all. The glass-domed clock on the mantelpiece is ticking. Outside a light rain patters against the window, and the electric light hums.

Crowley breaks the almost-quiet. “Whoever wrote that clearly never met you,” he says around a yawn, stretching. “S’nice, though. Pretty.” The _s_ is just a little more sibilant than usual, betraying his tiredness. One foot curls and uncurls, sliding against the sofa.

Aziraphale huffs out a laugh. “Now, are you trying to say that you don’t find me terrifying? For shame.”

“Oh, on occasion, definitely,” Crowley says. “Remember that time I spilt coffee on your favourite Folio edition of _Love’s Labours Lost?”_

“I thought we agreed never to talk about that again,” Aziraphale says, shutting his eyes. They hadn’t spoken for weeks, and the stalemate had only been broken when Crowley had found him a 1682 Quarto in mint condition and left it on his desk, wrapped in oilskin and a dark green ribbon.  

Aziraphale feels the shift of Crowley’s shoulder-blades as he shrugs. “Fair enough. Although it was a pretty textbook example of divine wrath. Only thing missing was the sword. Anyway! What I was saying, is, is –”

His hands sketch abstract shapes in the air, and Aziraphale watches them absently. He’s beginning to feel a little sleepy himself.

“ – bless it, I can’t think of the word,” Crowley says, frustrated. “You know. Divine. Celestial. Thing. I had it, you know, right before I dropped off. It’s that part of it they don’t like. Too far outside their frame of reference. Like trying to imagine infinity plus one, or something.”

“You _were_ asleep,” Aziraphale says, “I knew it.”

“Prove it.”

Aziraphale swats him with the book.

“Besides,” he adds, “people in glass houses, and so on and so forth. Er. You must know that you’re not exactly _very_ threatening yourself, my dear.”

“How dare you?” says Crowley, and starts to sit up, before realising that the effort it takes isn’t worth the outcome and flopping back down again. “How – I’m extremely threatening. Few people have ever been as threatening as me. I have a commendation for it.”

“A commendation? Specifically for being threatening?”

Crowley looks sulky. 

Aziraphale strokes a contrite hand through his hair, feeling him relax under it. He is feeling rather creative all of a sudden. “Look,” he starts. “I was thinking. Could you come up here for a moment? Yes, like that. There was something I wanted to…”

Crowley turns and wriggles his way upwards till they’re facing each other, almost nose to nose. “Yes?” he says. His eyes are very bright. Like amber. Or resin, hardened and worked to a shine.

“Thank you, yes, that was it,” Aziraphale says, kissing him.

Crowley works his hands into the loose curls of Aziraphale’s hair. Kisses him back with determination. There’s no halfway with kissing, no _almost –_ you’re either doing it or you aren’t. It’s like jumping from the highest diving board. The scariest part is the leap, the fall through the air, and after that it all gets easier.

“You know,” Aziraphale says, surfacing for air that he doesn’t need, “your eyes are like beautiful golden coins, glimmering at the bottom of a clear mountain river. I’ve never noticed that before. Funny, isn’t it?”

“Don’t talk shite,” Crowley tells him firmly, and dives once more.

Aziraphale wraps his arms around him tightly, slides a hand up his spine. Anyone watching would see nothing but empty air – but beneath Aziraphale’s fingers he can feel the space growing, forming itself into something like a pair of wings, rising up and outwards like a flame.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I am very into oddball theology and also the concept of eldritch horror!angels and demons, so this was a lot of fun to write. The painting Crowley is looking at is "Saint Michael expelling Lucifer and the Rebel Angels", by Rubens. The poem Aziraphale recites is from "The Duino Elegies", by Rainer Maria Rilke. Both are rather wonderful.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Fan Art] every angel is terrifying](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19092673) by [amosanguis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amosanguis/pseuds/amosanguis)
  * [every angel is terrifying [PODFIC]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20534663) by [mikripetra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mikripetra/pseuds/mikripetra)




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